Another hurricane season upon us, is Georgia's number up?

Friday

On the Georgia coast, our collective memory of hurricanes is too short to be accurate, says Al Sandrik, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Jacksonville.

"We all know hurricanes don't hit Georgia," he told attendees at the Chatham County Hurricane Conference in May.

Sandrik, who's been studying hurricane history for years, made that statement with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

He went on to describe how hurricanes devastated the Georgia coast repeatedly in the 1800s. Using historical records such as newspaper archives and ship journals, he and other hurricane historians have assigned modern intensity designations to those storms. Georgia saw a major hurricane - a category 3 or higher - on average every 17 years that century.

Several factors indicate this century may be more like the stormy 1800s than the calm 1900s, Sandrik said. Climate change is one.

"While no one knows why the 1800s were so active for coastal Georgia, one possibility is that we were coming out of the Little Ice Age," he said. "We had a major climatic shift."

The climate shift may have pushed the Bermuda-Azores high pressure system farther to the west and north, thereby steering hurricanes toward Georgia.

We're in a climatic warming phase now, too.

We're also in what hurricane researchers call an active phase in the multidecadal cycle of hurricane activity. We entered that in 1995; such phases can last 20 to 40 years.

This year's seasonal forecast calls for an above-average number of named storms. The team headed by William Gray at Colorado State University predicts 15 named storms for 2010 compared with an average year's total of 10.

Not that the number matters, said Ron Morales, the NWS warning coordination meteorologist in Charleston.